Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

EVENTS

I don’t believe in Imaginary Property (IP)

Canada’s been placed on the US’ copyright blacklist due to our ongoing resistance to implement new DMCA-alike laws to appease the RIAA / MPAA. The Obama administration is apparently upset that Harper keeps promising to enact new laws to protect an outmoded and archaic business model, yet not delivering. Join the club on that one — he ain’t exactly a paragon of virtue to us neither, Jack.

We signed the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) Internet treaties in 1997, much to my chagrin. Presently, we already pay a ridiculously high levy on every piece of blank media (CDs, DVDs, cassette tapes, regardless of what’s going on them, doesn’t matter), a tithe that goes directly to the CRIA, Canada’s answer to the RIAA. Now, at the very least as of my trip to Georgia last year, the States has declared they reserve the rights to search and sieze all counterfeit or copyright-infringing media without warrant at the border, including the contents of your laptop or iPod. I wasn’t searched, but if I had known this before my trip, I wouldn’t have brought my work laptop with me, for fear that it booting to Linux would make me an enemy of the state for not paying the Microsoft Tax, or a terrorism suspect for using a “hacker operating system”, or something else overreactionary and horrifying.

One way or another, the whole concept of copyright has to change, and soon, before these laws turn “piracy”, the act of copying some data without depriving the original user of their copy, from mere copyright infringement, into criminal activity.

Comments

I really wonder how far will trying to ask the government / run for it will really do in breaking this horrible system … I think people need to just infringe and ignore copyright as much as possible I mean things as blatent as dissembling/REing windows xp to make a new X gui or breeding cells from your hair follicles god(ugh……) forbid.

[…] the US pulled on Canada. He evidently urged the States via his director of policy Zoe Addington to put Canada on the US’ “piracy watch list”, a move that hurt Canada’s international standing wholly baselessly (we’re last place […]